by Herman Wouk
Well, it’s now a quarter past two in the morning, and I could easily write into the dawn and not be tired. I wish, my sweet, that I might have proposed to you in the most beautiful place in the world with music and perfume all around instead of pounding out an incoherent letter in a dismal ship’s office, which you will receive all crumpled and dirty. But if this letter can make you half as happy as your answer saying yes would me, then no trappings could make it any better.
I love you, May. Write quickly, quickly.
WILLIE
He read this letter over perhaps twenty times, cutting a phrase here, inserting a sentence there. He finally became numb to its meaning. Then he copied it all over on the typewriter, dropped the papers in his room, and made himself a cup of coffee. It was four o’clock when he picked up the smooth draft and read it for the last time. He got a very clear picture of how it would strike May: astounding, somewhat groveling, wild, and babbling-but still, the truth. There were a dozen more places where he wanted to correct it, but he decided to let it go. It was impossible to make it a good, dignified letter; he was in a bad, undignified position. He was crawling back to a girl he had jilted. No words could change that. If she still loved him-and he was fairly sure she did, judging by their last kiss-then she would swallow his foolishness and her pride and accept him. That was all he wanted, and this proposal sufficed for it, if any would. He sealed the letter up, dropped it in the ship’s mailbox, and went to sleep, feeling that life from now on, failing another Kamikaze, would be an empty wait while his letter went halfway around the world and the answer returned the same long way.
Not only Willie was becalmed; the Caine was, too. The resourceful repair men of the Pluto quickly patched up the damage on the deckhouse; but they grubbed around in the smashed fireroom for two weeks, and concluded that mending the boiler was not a job for them. It could be done, they said, only by diverting an excessive amount of the tender’s time and resources. There were more useful Kamikaze victims to be mended-new destroyers and destroyer escorts. So the hole in the deck was plated over, and the Caine was ordered away from the tender’s side to an anchor berth far up the harbor. There it sat, while the Okinawa campaign ended and the operations officer of ComMinePac tried to make up his mind, among a thousand other preoccupations, what to do with it.
The ship still had two boilers in the undamaged fireroom with which it could make twenty knots or so. Early in July the operations officer, Captain Ramsbeck, came aboard and they went out to sea for a run, stirring up the barnacles for the first time in weeks. Ramsbeck explained to Keefer and Willie that MinePac was reluctant to send the old ship back home for overhaul while there was any life in it. Once out of the forward area it would probably not return in time to be of any help in the massive sweeping duty which lay ahead. The Caine steamed smoothly on the trial run, and Keefer said he was willing and anxious to take part in the next operation. Willie pointed out that some four-pipers which had been converted to seaplane tenders ran perfectly well on two boilers. Ramsbeck seemed favorably impressed, as much by the attitudes of the captain and exec as by the Caine’s performance. Next day he sent them the operation order for a sweep in the China Sea, with the Caine penciled in.
One morning a couple of days before the sortie for the sweep, Willie was in his room writing the war diary for June, and taking long pauses to wonder why he hadn’t yet heard from May. The gangway messenger knocked at the open doorway and said, “Pardon me, sir. The Moulton is coming alongside.” Willie ran up to the main deck. The bow of the other DMS was swinging in beside the forecastle, and he could see his old friend Keggs on the bridge, sunburned and salty-looking, leaning over the bulwark and shouting orders. Willie jumped across the gap as soon as the lines were secured and met Keggs coming down the bridge ladder.
“Captain Keggs, I presume?”
“Damn right!” Keggs threw a long arm around his neck. “Am I addressing Captain Keith?”
“Exec Keith. Congratulations, Ed.”
When they were settled in the captain’s cabin of the Moulton, drinking coffee, Keggs said, “Well, it figures, Willie. I’ve been at sea six months longer than you. You’ll have the Caine by December.” The horse face had acquired authority and poise; it was almost a stallion’s face now. Keggs looked younger, Willie thought, then he had at midshipmen school three years ago, desperately poring over ordnance textbooks in the dawn. They spoke mournfully about Roland Keefer for a while. Then Keggs said, looking at Willie sidewise, “I see you’re not talking about the Caine mutiny-”
“You know about it?”
“Willie, it was all over the DMS outfit. All we heard was scuttlebutt, though-nobody ever got the straight dope-is it still restricted or something?”
“Of course not.” Willie told him the story. The captain of the Moulton kept shaking his head incredulously, and a couple of times he whistled.
“Maryk’s the luckiest guy in the Navy, Willie. I don’t know how he ever got off-”
“Well, as I say, this lawyer was sensational-”
“He must have been- Want me to tell you something? One night down in Noumea I got drunk with the exec-under the Iron Duke, this was-and he quoted Article 184 to me by heart. And he said he was just waiting for the Duke to do one really impossible thing, and he’d nail him. But he never mentioned it to me again. You should have seen the way Sammis made him crawl, too-”
“They never do that one thing, Ed. That’s the catch.”
Seventeen days before the end of the war, the minesweeper Caine finally swept a mine.
They were out in the China Sea, in a double line of minesweepers that stretched five miles across the water. The sun was low in the east, dazzling white. Sweeping had begun at sunrise, and the ragged line of ships was advancing cautiously over the shallow green sea into the mine field. The mine popped up suddenly in the Caine’s wake and wallowed low in the water, a big rusty ball knobbed with little horns. Keefer, squeaking with excitement, ordered a dye marker dropped. The signalmen ran up the warning flag hoist. Behind them a sub chaser headed for the mine and began shooting at it with machine guns. It went up with a terrific roar and whoosh, in a tower of pink-and-white spray a hundred feet high. All along the sweep formation mines began to bob up. The water was spotted everywhere with yellow-green markers. The Caine was in the second line, so the sailors began to watch the water ahead anxiously.
In less than a minute they say a mine dead ahead in a mantle of yellow water. Keefer danced three times completely around the bridge, yelling contradictory maneuvering orders, as the Caine bore down on the mine and the guns hammered away at it. They were within a hundred feet of it when it vanished, with a hellish howl and a tremendous cataract climbing to the sky. Then the lookouts spotted another mine ahead on the port side, and almost at the same moment the Caine cut loose two more mines. There was pure bedlam on the bridge for five minutes.
But every novelty, even a deadly novelty like minesweeping, gets its bloom rubbed off quickly and settles into a routine. By the time the Caine had swept seven mines and exploded half a dozen, it became clear even to the nervous captain that the process wasn’t a hard one, nor, with luck, mortally dangerous. So he went to the other extreme, and became very debonair in his conning, and nuzzled up so close to a couple of mines in order to shoot at them that he scared Willie badly.
There was an other-worldly strangeness about that morning for Willie. He had long ago become convinced that it was part of the fate of the Caine never to sweep a mine. The irony had seemed a fitting crown for the ship’s freakish career. He had studied up his minesweeping, all the same, but he had really thought the manual was just another useless book in the safe, like the Dutch and French codes. He had even begun, quite irrationally, to disbelieve in the existence of mines. All the mess of gear on the fantail, then, really served a purpose! The paravanes did dive below the level of anchored mines and kite there on an even keel; the cutting cables actually did cut the mine moorings; and the mines really were iron ball
s that could blow up a ship. It was one more proof-Willie was getting used to them by now, but he still felt uneasy shame when another cropped up-that the Navy more or less knew what it was doing.
The minesweeping career of the Caine was destined to be brief-to that extent his instinct had been right. Willie was just beginning to enjoy the perilous game when the fuel pumps of number-one boiler collapsed, and the ship was slowed to twelve knots. This reduced the maneuverability of the long vessel below the safety point in an area of drifting mines. The OTC ordered the Caine to drop out of line and return to Okinawa. It was just before noon. An auxiliary mine sweeper, one of the clean-up ships in the rear, steamed forward to close the gap, and the Caine faltered and turned away. Keggs, on the bridge of the Moulton next in line, waved good-by to Willie and sent him a blinker message: Lucky. Maybe I’ll try throwing a wrench in my pumps, too. See you later.
On the way back they had the melancholy pleasure of setting off one more mine floating miles behind the sweepers. Willie was the one who spotted the grim brown ball. He watched the mine through the glasses, feeling a sort of proprietary affection for it as it resisted the hail of machine-gun bullets splattering it. Then suddenly it wasn’t there, replaced in an eye blink by a column of boiling pink water; and World War II was over for the U.S.S. Caine.
Nobody knew that at the time, of course. The ship limped into Buckner Bay (as Nakagusuku Wan had been renamed), and Keefer sent a despatch to the Pluto requesting a period alongside. Next day he received an acid official letter from the tender. Owing to a rush of more urgent work, the Caine could not be accommodated alongside until late in August. Keefer was ordered to make every effort to do his own repairing, using material the tender would be glad to furnish.
So again the old minesweeper swung at anchor in the bay, accumulating rust and barnacles. Willie had plenty of time to worry about May, and he began to be very nervous. Six weeks had passed since he had sent off the proposal. In the interim he had written several times to his mother, and she had answered the letters. He comforted himself with the usual seasonings of men overseas. His letter or May’s had gone astray in a Navy foul-up. A typhoon had damaged the ship carrying the mail. May wasn’t in New York. Wartime postal service was erratic at best-and so forth and so forth. None of these thoughts cheered him much because he knew how fast and reliable the armed forces mail really was. Two weeks to twenty days sufficed in Okinawa for a letter and a reply. The men were writing hundreds of letters, having nothing better to do, and Willie was very familiar with the mechanics of delivery. He grew gloomier with every day that passed. Three times he wrote passionate pleading letters and then tore them up because he felt like a fool when he read them over.
One afternoon he came into his room and saw on his desk a fat envelope addressed in a feminine handwriting-not his mother’s rounded slope, May’s spiky vertical hand, he thought in an electrifying instant, and fell on the letter. He tore it open frantically. It was from Lieutenant (jg) Ducely. A large folded newspaper page fell out of the envelope to the floor.
DEAR WILLIE,
I thought you and whoever’s left on the old hell ship would get a bang out of the enclosed. I’m back in Public Relations-90 Church, thank God just a stone’s throw from my favorite bars-and this thing passed across my desk yesterday afternoon. I’m supposed to file it but I wrote for another copy, and am sending this on. I guess Old Yellowstain has been put out to pasture for good, which ought to please you. Stuber Forks, Iowa! I die laughing just saying that over and over to myself. Well, he can’t run a supply depot up on a reef, anyway.
We have heard all kinds of vague stories about the great “Caine mutiny” back here. It’s become a kind of legend, though nobody knows what really happened except that Maryk got acquitted. Well, wouldn’t you know, with my two battle stars and actually having been on the fabulous Caine and all I am the grizzled sea warrior around here, and of course it just murders me, but naturally I play it big. I could have a harem of Waves, if I cared for big behinds and hairy legs, but I guess I am a little fussy. Especially as I am practically engaged. This will probably kill you. When I got back-you remember all those letters I wrote home about that girl in the New Yorker ad-well, a pal of mine in Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborne actually tracked her down for me, and she is probably the most beautiful girl in New York, Crystal Gayes (her real name is a Polish jawbreaker) a very well-known model, and a really sweet kid. I have had a lot of Stork Club duty in the past six months, and my boy, believe it or not, it beats the dear old Caine. By the way I saw your inamorata May Wynn singing at some club and she looked mighty fetching but I didn’t get a chance to talk to her.
Well, Willie, I hope you’ve forgiven me for all the times I threw you. I am not made of your stern stuff. I never told you how terrifically I admired you for standing up under Old Yellowstain’s persecution, though I know most of it was my fault. I am just a grasshopper, I guess, but you, my boy, are a cross between John Paul Jones and a Christian martyr.
Well, if you ever get home, look me up in the phone book. My mother is Agnes B. Ducely. Best regards to the boys, and stay away from those Kamikazes.
Sincerely,
ALFRED
P. S. Note that O.Y. is still lieutenant commander. His AlNav came out in March, so I guess he was passed over, and that is curtains, of course. Hooray.
Willie picked up the newspaper sheet. It was the front page of the Stuber Forks, Iowa, Journal. A feature story at the bottom was ringed with red crayon. There was a two-column picture of Queeg, sitting at a desk, pretending to be writing with a pencil, and looking into the camera with a sly half-smile. Willie felt a qualm of shock and disgust, seeing the face.
BATTLE-SCARRED PACIFIC VETERAN
NEW EXEC OF LOCAL NAVY DEPOT
The story, written in the stiff wordy prose of a high-school theme, made much of Queeg’s exploits on the Caine. There was no mention of the mutiny or the court-martial. Willie stared at Queeg’s face for a long time, then crumpled the sheet, went into the wardroom, and tossed it through the scuttle into the sea. At once he regretted it; he knew he should have shown it to Keefer. He was upset by the reminder of old horrors, and by the brief mention of May, and most of all by bitter envy of Ducely. He knew that this was a foolish feeling. He wouldn’t have traded places with Ducely; but he had the feeling anyway, nasty and strong.
When the news of the atom bomb came through, and then hard upon it the announcement that Russia had declared war on Japan, a complete change took place in the officers and the men of the Caine. There were holiday faces on the decks and in the passageways. The talk was of peacetime plans, of marrying, of going to school, of setting up in business. There were die-hards in the crew who maintained that it was all propaganda, but they were cried down. Every day the admirals sent out stern warnings that the war was still on; they made no impression.
Like the others, Willie began to calculate his chances for getting out of the Navy; but about the decks he kept a stiff face, and pushed the ship’s routine along against the current of merry relaxation among the crew. It annoyed and amused him at once to see the new officers clustering like bugs around the wardroom radio, exclaiming impatiently at the delay in announcing Japan’s surrender. The more recently aboard, it seemed, the louder they complained. The ship’s doctor in particular (the Caine had a doctor at last, a June arrival) announced at frequent intervals his entire disgust with the government and the Navy, and expressed his belief that Japan had surrendered a week ago, and the whole thing was being kept secret while laws were hastily drawn up to keep the reserves in service for another couple of years.
On the evening of August 10, a more than ordinarily silly movie was being shown on the forecastle. Willie sat through a reel of it, and then went below. He was on his bunk in his room; reading Bleak House, when he heard the jazz music on the radio break off sharply. “We interrupt this program to bring you an important news bulletin-” He leaped to the deck and scampered to the wardroom. It was the surr
ender announcement: just a couple of sentences, and then the music resumed.
“Thank Christ,” Willie thought, in tremendous exaltation, “I made it. I came out alive.”
There was no noise topside. He wondered whether anybody else on the ship had heard it. He went to the scuttle and peered out at the moonlit harbor and the dark bluish mass of Okinawa. Then he thought, “Keefer will take her to the boneyard. I will never be the captain of a United States warship. I missed.”
A military band blared from the radio, When Johnny Comes Marching Home. A single green star shell suddenly burst over Okinawa and floated slowly down near the moon. Then, all at once, an unbelievably brilliant cascade of lights and fireworks began rising from the island: a million crimson streams of tracers, countless blue and white searchlights fanning frantically back and forth, red flares, green flares, white flares, star shells, a Fourth of July display many miles long of ammunition suddenly sprayed to the starry black heavens in a thank-prayer for peace. And a masculine chorus boomed from the radio,
“When Johnny comes marching home again,
Hurrah, hurrah,
We’ll give him a hearty welcome then,
Hurrah, hurrah-”
Now the deck overhead began to thunder with the dancing and jumping of the sailors. And still the bursts of color rose from Okinawa in million-dollar streams, a glory of triumphant waste, and the rattle and roar of the guns came rolling over the water, and the ships in the harbor began firing, too, and then Willie heard the Caine’s 20-millimeters rattling as they had rattled at the Kamikaze, making the bulkheads shudder.
